BLACK KISS opens
with the murder of a womanizing modeling agent and the
disappearance of the model he has shacked up with in a
sleazy red light district hotel (only a severed finger is
left behind). Then we go back a few days and meet naive new
model Asuka (Reika Hashimoto) looking for a place to stay. A
fellow model introduces her to cynical ex-model Kasumi
(Kaori Kawamura) whose previous two boyfriends committed
suicide and whose eccentric artist friend/roommate Mari has
recently disappeared. Receiving a less than warm welcome,
Asuka moves into Kasumi's red light district apartment. One
stormy night, she hears a man's screams and witnesses a
woman in black mutilating a man through the window of the
hotel across the street (the opening murder). The dead man,
whose body has been dissected and arranged like a bizarre
sculpture, turns out to have been a former employer of
Kasumi who had been harassing her. As more rivals and
friends of Kasumi meet grisly deaths, she and Asuka become
closer. Asuka recognizes a photograph of Mari as the
murderer but Mari is discovered to have been a victim of the
killer prior to the killing she witnessed yet Mari turns up
in the background of a photograph taken on the night of the
murder. The police start to wonder if the killer of Kasumi's
sister who hung himself in prison and her two boyfriends who
committed suicide could have been previous victims of the
killer and whether someone is trying to frame Kasumi or
possess her.

A cross between a Dario Argento thriller, an eighties giallo
(like NOTHING UNDERNEATH) and SE7EN, the film
is stunning to look at and the film is suspenseful and
compelling up until the less-than-satisfying ending
(motivated by the director wanting to defy serial killer
film conventions). Though it compares poorly to the somewhat
similarly-themed Korean thriller TELL ME SOMETHING,
the film reflexively pokes at itself and other similar
thrillers with remarks about how contrived and deliberately
planned the seemingly random killings and series of red
herrings really are. Unlike the serial killer films - but
like Giallo films focused on the prurient aspects of the
fashion world - the police procedural scenes provide mainly
expository plot info that the suspects and victims are not
going to fess up and are rife with more red herrings than
the scenes involving the suspects - including a tangent
involving a criminologist with an interest in voodoo who
only provides a previously available profile on the killer
that no one else bothered to look for only after he has
himself become a suspect (having also been present in the
crime scene photograph along with Mari). The cinematography
is excellent although it seems more like a color-gelled
version of SE7EN's aesthetics than that of a Dario
Argento film. The killings are grisly but the onscreen
carnage is thankfully restrained.

Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters's Region 1 NTSC DVD of this Japanese
film is a mixed bag. As usual with their product, they've
translated several extras from the Japanese 2-disc edition (also
released in an edition with a figurine) including two
featurettes, deleted scenes, and a still gallery but the image
itself - while pleasing on an interlaced television - is
sometimes painful on the eyes when viewed on a progressive
monitor. There is no PAL-NTSC ghosting and Japan is an NTSC
country so it is likely the result of excessive edge enhancement
(noticeable in brightly lit scenes but it also makes some blue
screen and wire work more apparent) and compression issues from
cramming the extras from the Japanese 2-disc set onto one
dual-layer disc (although the total disc size is only 6.60 GB -
note the low bitrate for the feature - including the extras and
the 2+ hour film!).

The audio mix is a pleasingly enveloping
2-channel Dolby Digital mix but the end credits sport a
DTS-Stereo logo (which is DTS's 2-channel stereo cinema format
so the disc's audio is not mixed down from a six channel mix)
and is more than adequate even for a film that would seem
designed for 5.1.